Ahead Nero 7 Premium Edition

Nero 7 Premium now offers both the PC and TV media management experience for a complete solution. With over 18 new and updated applications in ONE powerful piece of software, Nero 7 Premium is truly the only partner you need for today’s digital home. There was a time when Nero and Easy CD Creator could only burn CDs. Now, if you need to do anything with an optical disc, audio, image or video file, these suites probably cover it. Creative applications such as video and photo editing are fairly basic compared with dedicated software, but as general introductions to the joys of modern computing these suites are tremendous value, and their presentation is generally first rate.

Nero 7 Premium's 15 programs cover CD and DVD burning, video editing, DVD-Video authoring, copying and playback, photo viewing and editing, backup, audio editing, music production, disc label design, packet writing, a Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) media-streaming server and two new applications. Nero Scout is a media-cataloguing tool that organises music by artist, album or genre and videos and photos by folder or date. This is unusual in that it appears in My Computer for quick access from any program - in theory, at least. In practice we found it slow and unreliable.

Nero Home is Ahead's answer to Windows Media Center Edition, presenting audio, video and photos in an armchair-friendly interface. However, for some reason it plays two audio tracks or video soundtracks simultaneously when the user skips from one to another, which we found very odd.We were amazed to find that Nero's DVD-authoring tool can encode 5.1-surround Dolby Digital soundtracks, as this feature is rare even in high-end video software. However, using it is convoluted, as only the music programs and not the video-editing application can mix in surround sound; finished mixes are imported from the former into the latter. This makes it nigh on impossible to create surround effects that sync with video, but it does mean that musicians who want to experiment with surround sound can distribute their mixes cheaply. They'll probably want a more capable audio sequencer than Nero's to compose with, though.

Nero is regarded by many as the emperor of the disc burning world, although there's a lot more that this Premium edition can do besides CD/DVD writing. In fact there's so much it can do, it's probably easier just to list the tasks it can't handle. Nero 7 Premium doesn't word-process, it doesn't produce Web pages and it doesn't make your toast in the morning. But it does just about everything else, in terms of multimedia at any rate.The suite, which features no fewer than 18 applications, operates very smoothly from a central, user-friendly interface. Simply select whether you're using a CD or DVD from the drop-down menu at the top, then further menus allow you to work with data projects, audio, video, backup facilities or various extras. There's also a favorites menu so you can quickly access the programs you use the most.

Burning a CD, for example, is a matter of selecting CD, then Make Data CD (or Audio CD), which brings up the Nero Express 7 program window automatically. You then use the Add button to browse to the appropriate files, with a simple graph illustrating how full the disc is. Finally, you type in a name for the CD and click Burn. It doesn't get any easier than this, and burning a test disc was both quick and painless.